Doctors warn against complacency in life after COVID-19 vaccines

A doctor is concerned that as time wears on and more people receive their COVID-19 vaccine, conversations about the dangers of the pandemic will subside.

The battle against COVID-19 is far from over.

Vaccinations across the country are ahead of schedule.

“By my 100th day in office, we will have administered 200 million shots in people’s arms,” said President Biden.

Beyond his new goal, the President remains quiet on his pandemic plan on Thursday during a press conference.

That silence is concerning to scientists given recent CDC stats. There have been about 7,000 coronavirus cases per day in the past week. This shows a 7% increase.

Dr. Stephen Kissler is with Harvard’s School of Public Health in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases.

“There’s a danger in getting complacent and just sort of implicitly accepting that by not continuing to talk about it,” said Dr. Kissler.

That danger lies in pockets where there are new infections and fast-spreading variants.

“We don’t know what the variants will do. We don’t know what new variants will emerge,” he said. “Each of them undermines our ability to control the pandemic in some way and many times in different ways.”

And, yes the president’s team is talking about this. Jeff Zients is the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator. “More vaccinators in the field, and more places for people to get vaccinated. Overall, we’ve made significant progress toward our ultimate goal,” Zients said.

Researchers believe that the messenger can, at times, be more important than the message itself.

Dr. Keri Althoff is with the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Trusted community messengers are playing a vital role in getting shots into arms,” said Dr. Althoff.

“I know that much of that work is being done. But I think that definitely hearing it from the President would give it sort of wider, wider knowledge,” Dr. Kissler said.

The knowledge can not only help influence decisions and get shots into arms.

Currently, there are 1,075 cases caused by variants in the state of Florida.